James Newton

Orenda Records Albums

“James Newton has forged an eclectic career as a jazz flautist, conductor and composer. Here, he demonstrates his skills as a creator of sacred music with hints of jazz and roots in the modernist aesthetics.” –Gramophone Magazine

“As in the seventeenth century, perhaps the composer and the improviser of the twenty-first century will coincide in the same person, now with a more complete awareness of his or her role in a global culture. If all our diverse history and memory are welcomed to live in such a present, the horizon of peaceful co-existence between people becomes possible. This generosity of vision on the path to a world music is Newton’s way.” –Stefano Zenni (translated by Pete Kercher)

Mr. Newton’s work encompasses chamber, symphonic, and electronic music genres, compositions for ballet and modern dance, and numerous jazz and world music contexts.

Mr. Newton has been the recipient of many awards, fellowships and grants, including the Ford Foundation, Guggenheim, National Endowment of the Arts and Rockefeller Fellowships, Montreux Grande Prix Du Disque and Downbeat International Critics Jazz Album of the Year, as well as being voted the top flutist for a record-breaking 23 consecutive years in Downbeat Magazine’s International Critics Poll.

In 2005 Newton decided to commence the greatest challenge of his compositional career – a trilogy of large-scale sacred works: a Mass, a St. Matthew Passion and a setting of Psalm 119. The Mass, completed in early 2007, received its premiere at the 2007 Metastasio Festival in Prato, Italy. Its U.S. premiere (an expanded choral version) occurred in 2011 with Grant Gershon conducting the Los Angeles Master Chorale at Walt Disney Concert Hall. Newton completed his St. Matthew Passion in 2014 and it received its World premiere, again with Grant Gershon conducting Coro e Orchestra del Teatro Regio di Torino, at the Torino Jazz and La Sidone Festivals in 2015. Mr. Newton is the first African American and the first composer rooted in the Jazz tradition to compose a St. Matthew Passion. His research on the final part of the trilogy, Psalm 119, began in the summer of 2017.

Newton currently holds a distinguished professorship at the University of California at Los Angeles in the Department of Music and Global Jazz Studies. He has also held professorships at University of California at Irvine, California Institute of the Arts, and Cal State University Los Angeles. In May of 2005 Newton was awarded a Doctor of Arts Degree, Honoris Causa, from California Institute of the Arts.